Tips for Updating Your Small Business Website

Building your own business website with WordPress has been a rite of passage for entrepreneurs for years now. A great website can serve as a passive sales channel, enhance your brand’s visibility, and attract more customers to your business.

To get the most out of your website, however, you need to make sure visitors aren’t leaving before they get a chance to learn what you’re offering.

With a bit of tweaking, you can update your website to offer the best value to you and a great experience for your potential customers.

A clear value proposition

The first thing a visitor should see when they visit your business website is a value proposition, or a clear description of the services you provide, the products you sell, and why you’re the best choice for your visitors.

For example, if you’re a daredevil performing for corporate and private events, consider a tagline and description like: Daring Feats, Nearly Free: Your Go-To Solution for Exciting Event Entertainment at a Fair Price.

This value proposition should be positioned above the fold, or the space visible without scrolling, on your website’s homepage. This means potential customers shouldn’t have to scroll at all to see your business’s elevator pitch.

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Trust signals

To communicate to visitors that your website and offerings are legitimate, it’s essential to include a variety of trust signals on your website. Trust signals do just that: they serve as a symbol of credibility and trustworthiness for your website and your business.

Some of the most powerful trust signals include:

• An SSL-secured website – The most basic sign that a website is safe is the presence of SSL security. This layer of protection on a website encrypts the data transferred between your computer and the servers—large computers used for storing and sharing data—hosting the website you’re visiting.
• Customer testimonials – One of the most effective trust signals is real customer testimonials that provide an honest account of what it’s like to work with your company. You can integrate open-review platforms, such as Trustpilot, directly into your site with dedicated plugins.
• Company standards and commitments – Wearing your core company tenets, like Northwest’s commitment to Privacy by Default®, like a badge of honor on your website can give visitors insight into how your company operates in an ethical way.

Including one or more of the trust signals above can quickly increase your website conversion rate, or the number of customers who follow through with making a purchase.

Use trustworthy TLDs

In addition to the trust signals above, consumers have learned to watch out for sketchy-looking website URLs, or website addresses, including being mindful of less common domain extensions, also known as top-level domains (TLDs).

Domain extensions like .shop and .info have gained popularity beside the typical .com and .net, but more obscure ones might give website visitors pause unless you have a great reason to use them. Make sure your website address is trustworthy and relevant to your business name.

Fast loading times

Nothing is worse than a website that moves at a crawl. Often, a slow website leads to a high visitor bounce rate, or a high number of visitors who leave your site without exploring further than the page they initially landed on. While you may not be a tech wizard, there are still some strategies you can use to fix slow load times on your business website.

Cache your content

Try installing WordPress plugins like WP Rocket or LiteSpeed Cache to reduce load speeds on your website by storing content in temporary, quickly accessible spaces called caches.

These spaces are typically created on a user’s device when they visit your website for the first time and are used to store copies of critical files, thereby reducing future load times. This process is called caching and is a common practice in website optimization.

Reduce image size

Images can occupy a significant portion of the limited space on your website, and loading these images can consume a substantial amount of computing resources. Rendering times for images can quickly become excessive and compound to create a sluggish experience for visitors.

Use plugins like Smush or TinyPNG to reduce the space and resources necessary to house images on your website. This is achieved by consolidating similar colors in images in a way that is barely visible, yet can significantly reduce the size of common image file types, such as JPEGs and PNGs.

Optimize for mobile devices

Since 2020, mobile devices have driven over half of website visits, according to Statista. Knowing this, it’s smart to make like a mermaid and go where the people are.

Ensure your website content is optimized for mobile by being mindful of its length and reducing the number of visible links to other pages on your website. Tools like dropdown menus can help you ensure your mobile users’ view isn’t crowded.

If you’re using WordPress, make sure any third-party themes you’re using are mobile responsive, meaning they’ll automatically adapt your content to the device it’s being viewed on. Test drive your website on multiple devices to get a feel for user experience, and take advantage of WordPress’s built-in mobile preview feature.

Take a close look at your business website

Optimization, trustworthiness, and value are what potential customers, partners, and clients are looking for when they visit your company’s website for the first time. When building your business website, consider these factors and how they influence the effectiveness of one of your most valuable business assets. Optimize where possible, test your changes, then repeat the process.